Trump and Kamala aim for the center with varying degrees of success

Everyone wants to be a centrist now.

It’s trendy.

Now, if an ordinary person, say a friend of yours, changed his position on important issues, you would probably offer an explanation, but politicians play by a different set of rules.

After a primary season in which both Donald Trump and now Kamala Harris have focused exclusively on energizing their bases, both are moving closer to — and in some cases racing toward — the center.

VICE PRESIDENT HARRIS ACCUSED OF ‘ACTIVELY PROMOTING’ ILLEGAL MIGRATION AND COORDINATING WITH MEXICO

Political theft is not a crime, or the prisons would be overcrowded.

Harris, in Las Vegas, blatantly copied Trump’s proposal to ban tip taxes on service workers.

Attention has been focused on the vice president, not only because she is new to the race, but because she has studiously avoided the press until her interview with CNN’s Dana Bash. She regularly returns to the plane for off-the-record sessions, where every reporter present gets a question, but that is obviously of limited value to the rest of us.

The bigger problem for Harris is that she has a number of far-left positions that she adopted in her 2020 presidential campaign and abandoned without explanation.

These include the abolition of private health insurance (under Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All program); his past opposition to fracking; and his support for decriminalizing illegal border crossings.

His repeated refrain: “My values ​​haven’t changed.”

On fracking, Harris told CNN: “I made it clear on the debate stage in 2020 that I would not ban fracking as vice president.” That’s not true. She said Joe Biden would not ban fracking.

The vice president offered an explanation of sorts: The administration had created more than 300,000 clean energy jobs and “that tells me… we can do it without banning fracking.”

FORMER PRESIDENT TRUMP BLAME ‘DISHONEST MEDIA’ FOR MISREPRESENTATION OF HOAXES

Bash cited another memory from the past: “There was a debate. You raised your hand when asked whether the border should be decriminalized or not. Do you still believe that?”

Harris: “I think there should be consequences. We have laws that need to be followed and enforced that address and deal with the problem of people crossing our border illegally.” There is no mention of why she changed her position.

What Kamala is doing is what most general election candidates do: moving to the center. Whatever she thought matched the mood of the country in 2019, including her previous career as a prosecutor, is clearly untenable today.

But on the Republican side, Trump is doing the same thing. He’s just getting less attention because he’s in so many other stories, from the Arlington Cemetery scandal to personal attacks on Harris.

This has been most visible in the case of abortion, which has become a difficult issue for Republicans. On one level, Trump owns the issue, because it was his three Supreme Court justices who allowed Roe to be overturned after a half-century of precedent.

But she has now said Florida’s six-week ban on the procedure is too short and that she believes there should be more weeks. There was some question about whether she would support a rival initiative in the state, but not about the comments about six weeks, when many women do not know they are pregnant.

When I interviewed the former president at Mar-a-Lago, he indicated that he would be in favor of a ban on abortion at 15 or 16 weeks, but that it would be decided at the state level, depending on the Supreme Court ruling.

WHY DID KAMALA HARRIS AND DANA BASH GET MIXED RATINGS IN VP’S FIRST MEDIA MEETING?

“He also declared that “my administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.” This has sparked a backlash among some pro-life groups, who now view Trump as essentially pro-choice.

Trump is essentially sliding toward the center, to make his position more palatable to a broader spectrum of voters, especially women, even though he has boasted about overturning Roe.

(In that Mar-a-Lago interview, I asked Trump why he changed his mind about TikTok after trying to ban the Chinese-owned app as president. He said it would help Facebook, which he cares more about, and of course TikTok has an enthusiastic base of younger users.)

Over the weekend, Trump said he would back another Florida measure to legalize recreational marijuana use. He said the state should not “ruin lives and waste taxpayer money” by prosecuting people who possess small amounts for personal use. Again, a move toward a more moderate position that has drawn criticism from some conservatives.

Kamala accused him of changing his mind. She said that as president, his Justice Department cracked down on marijuana smokers.

Part of what’s happening is that both candidates are ignoring the timing of their past stances for political gain. In one Trump ad, Harris says, “Everyday prices are too high. Food, rent, gas, back-to-school clothes,” but edits it with, “Biden’s economic policy is working.”

Harris was talking about high prices caused by the pandemic in a speech last month, and “Bidenomics” was from a speech last year when she was reacting to a monthly jobs report.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

Kamala says Trump is pushing Project 2025, even though he rejected the Heritage project early on and repeatedly (even though many of his former White House aides are on staff).

Moving toward the center is an art, and that’s what both candidates are attempting right now.